The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art or suggestions of the prior art, by inclusion in this section.
A living organism is interdependent with its environment. For example, the living organism may have chemical interactions with its environment based on biophysical factors, e.g., by exchanging mass, energy, or other properties. Pollution in the air, water, and land on Earth will likely harm us. On the other hand, humans' activities may pollute nature and disrupt the dynamic equilibrium of the balance of nature.
Our environment is also at least partially man-made, e.g., the buildings providing shelter for people, the streets leading people from one place to another, or the city hosting a social environment for people to interact with each other and their institutions.
Various environmental parameters may be measured by their respective suitable sensors. A sensor is an instrument to measure a physical property, e.g., an acoustic, chemical, electrical, or optical property of an object in our environment, and convert the measurement to a signal, e.g., an electrical or optical signal, which may be read by an observer or another instrument. Sensors become ubiquitous at least due to their ever-shrinking size. Sensors may be manufactured on a microscopic scale as microsensors, such as by using microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology, or on a nano-scale as nanosensors, such as by using nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) technology and/or nanotechnology.